On December 20th, Bungie launched the next exotic weapon quest launched for all season pass holders. This is the first weapon that was completely designed by Mercules. Since it’s launch, it’s actually been the cause of many bugs and DC. So much so, that they had to switch off the API again.
The mission is like an introduction to the DSC mechanics of the scanner, operator and suppressor roles. I really enjoyed it. The fact that they reused a lot of DSC assets didn’t bother me at all. This even had an even better jumping puzzle, during which you could see Earth and the Traveller sitting on top of the last city.
It seemed to me that this wasn’t to scale; the Traveller is too big in this representation, compared to how it looks in the sky above the Last City. However, even this didn’t bother me that much. It was a great perspective.
The mission has you getting to the Seraph Station using similar pods that were used in the DSC mechanic of the Atraks encounter. They ferry you to orbit, it’s majestic There’s a microwave floor, like in Zero Hour, the aforementioned DSC jumping puzzle through space, which I really enjoyed.
Weirdly, it feels a bit like a dungeon, but it has no checkpoints, which royally sucks if you’re playing on legend. For some reason, the difficulty scaling with a fireteam on legend is just stupid. This becomes very apparent in the room where three Brigs spawn in.
The last 4 warmind nodes are in the mission and they reward red patterns for Ikelos weapons you need patterns for, which is cool. The yellow drones can be shot now, and they reward a special little insight that I won’t spoil. Just make sure that you get the security upgrade from the helm instead of the other two options. This will allow you to completely finish this mission.
The weapon is craftable. Now that it’s been more than a week, we know that each of the 4 catalysts can be obtained by running Seraph’s Shield on legend difficulty. The first one grants feeding frenzy. It was shortly after this that Bungie shut down the API. I’m still amazed that the whole studio shuts down until January 13th. That’s mental. They should have devs working elsewhere on the planet, like Asia, so it’s not an issue to support the game over Western holidays. Since I’m in Asia, it’s really annoying that the API is down. I can’t really switch my loadouts or switch guns. It’s annoying.
The actual weapon is pretty good. It’s a 450 rpm pulse, which have always been a bit meh, but they got buffed enough to be relevant. I heard the 2 burst setting can compete with DMT at some ranges. It also has a 4 burst. The telemetry data takes too much time to gather. I feel like it’s tuned for pvp, not pve. Once you’ve got enough data, you can convert it to a sniper for up to 4 shots. It’s pretty interesting.
The API is down for a week, which means no DIM or 3rd party apps to change loadouts. No LFG. It’s terrible.
memoirs on a rainy day 
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